Arch. Anna Rita Donatella Amato, PhD
Prof. Marco Maretto
This research comes from the idea that the tools of urban morphology can be applied on “informal” contemporary city. Informal fabrics in fact are basically
spontaneous fabrics, but “spontaneous” are a large part of pre-modern urban fabrics on which urban morphology developed as a discipline. It is possible
then to fi nd some interesting morphological analogies between the urban processes of historical cities and those of the major slums in many contemporary metropolises.
Starting from this assumption it is taken the case study of Villa 31 in Buenos Aires. This fabric is of great interest for the purposes of our work. It is located
in a strategic position with respect to the historical and economic centre of the Argentine capital and it has already a first social and building stratifi cation that makes it a very useful example to extend to other similar cases. The application of urban morphological tools to contemporary slums should, in our opinion, make it possible to critically understand the transformation processes of these kind of neighbourhoods (often considered chaotic, illogical and so “unreadable”), both from the urban point of view and from the social- economic aspects, in order to consciously design the regeneration of its fabrics.
